ABSTRACT: I discuss how Barrett Browning uses metaphors of shared breath and speech (informed by spiritualism and mesmerism) to inaugurate a collaborative poetic utterance, one that channels the voices not of spirits, but of the disenfranchised. For EBB, however, the receptive and collective “I” of Aurora Leigh also serves to revise the lyric “I” of a male-dominated poetic tradition for the purposes of a woman poet.

ABSTRACT: This article examines the focalization of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and argues that the ear (and not the eye) of Austen’s heroine, Anne Elliot, primarily guides the novel’s narration. Furthermore, this essay revises conceptualizations of Anne “as a listener” by tracing the parallel changes in Anne’s relationship to sound and the development of her character.

ABSTRACT: This article examines the music and orchestration of Thomas Holcroft's stage melodrama, A Tale of Mystery, as voices for the voiceless, the "disempowered en masse." These hallmarks of the English Romantic melodrama act as an extra-linguistic utterance circumventing the manipulation of words employed by oppressive systems of power.

ABSTRACT: This paper considers how middle-class Victorian culture adopted Shakespearean drama for instruction in a kind of interpersonal literacy. The paper surveys the use of oral Shakespeare delivery for deciphering and understanding others in both home education curricula and phrenological character readings as context for an analysis of Shakespeare delivery in Charlotte Bronte's industrial novel, Shirley.